QOTD: "Today we care about budgets more than anything. Our American future hangs on the ability of government to cut budget.

[Calvin] Coolidge cut the budget, and even better, cut it during peace and prosperity. He left a federal budget lower than the one that greeted him when he arrived in office. He managed to freeze or cut the budget over more than five years in office. If you look at charts of presidents — Nixon, Ike, and Reagan — you see them failing on this score.

What else is cool? Coolidge was a pragmatist. He didn’t start out with a tax theory. But he observed over time that lower tax rates sometimes brought in extra revenue. The success of his and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s experiment with rate cuts has been obscured by our modern history books. But that success was real, and it was fun to get close to it." --Amity Shlaes